Joe Bageant wrote many newspaper and magazine articles over the years, but with the arrival of the Internet, he began putting his essays online and eventually developed a blog as a way to present his thoughts and communicate with his readers. His online work was greatly facilitated by his friend and webmaster, Ken Smith. From these beginnings, Joe eventually wrote two books: Deer Hunting With Jesus and Rainbow Pie. A third book of his 25 best essays was put together by Ken Smith under the title Waltzing At The Doomsday Ball.

Joe passed away in 2011, but his online presence was preserved by Ken Smith at JoeBageant.net.

In 2016, Ken passed away and the longterm viability of Joe’s website became questionable.

We have established this site to keep Joe’s work available online. The site includes Joe’s blog posts and communications with readers, his essays, interviews and videos, as well as whatever else we could locate on the Internet.

Blogs are normally presented with the latest article first and the oldest article last. This makes sense if the blog is ongoing, but since this is an archive, we have reversed the order so interested readers can see the development of Joe’s thoughts on the progressing (retrogressing?) social, economic and political scene.

If any readers have content – Joe’s writing, pictures, personal communications, etc. – appropriate to the site, please use the Contact Form and we can discuss adding such content.

Commenting is turned off on Joe’s posts but we invite you to comment here to let us know you’ve visited and what you think.

How can the region of America that gave us lynching, Jim Crow, Harry Byrd, George Wallace, Taliban Christianity, David Duke, the KKK, Bible hair, Tammy Fay Bakker, congregational snake handling, the poll tax, inbreeding, and chitterlings possibly take another step back down the stairs of human evolution?

I’d be the first to admit that sitting here in this garden shed drinking Jim Beam and feeding pork rinds to my dog Bingo (a black mutt of the type we call a “piss hound” around here) may not be the best vantage point from which to examine national security affairs.

Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there.

“Good for you, Lynndie England, you chinless, inbred, runty, androgynous backwoods mutt! When you mimed a crotch-shot at that hooded detainee, you reminded us all of what Imperial service should be like: one long S&M tour of the tropics, where every man, woman and child of the conquered peoples exists solely as an object for your pleasure.” — John Dolan, columnist for the website, Exile

By Joe Bageant

When I saw the above arrogant, piece of witty horseshit, I wanted to go strangle John Dolan myself. Then I came back to the realization that all writing is masturbation, mine included, and that some of us do it with our eyes closed — as John Dolan does. If he had even one eye open he would have seen the pathos and national hypocrisy represented by “the girl with the leash.”